THE SUMMIT

So far—less than 12 hours into my week or so in Dublin—the planets have been aligning very nicely, as I just got to spend a splendid evening in the company of two of my favorite friends . . . who also happen to be my colleagues in Irish Studies: Rob Savage from Boston College and Louis de Paor from the National University of Ireland-Galway. Rob and I go all the way back to 1987, when we met in the microfilm room at BC. When we discovered last week that we would be overlapping in Dublin—Rob is here partly to launch his new book, A Loss of Innocence?: Television and Irish Society, 1960-72—we decided to end up under the same hotel roof. That makes the socializing very easy. . . . Both Rob and I go back a long way with Louis too—an Irish-language poet whom I have written on not once but twice.

So we had an Irish Studies “summit meeting” this evening—over pints and pizza. As the accompanying photo documents, we found ourselves in a very fine old pub indeed . . .

While our conversation ranged widely, one matter that we did not engage with, but which is sharing the day’s news headlines with the FIFA World Cup, is the release of the official Saville Report on the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of 14 Northern Irish citizens by British paratroopers 38 years ago. The Report took 12 years and 1.2 million Euros to complete—and the verdict is that the British soldiers acted irresponsibly and recklessly in gunning down unarmed and unequivocally innocent civilians. I had forgotten that the Report was to be released today . . . until I saw a news report on TV as I passed through Heathrow airport very early this morning which included a statement by Ian Paisley, Jr., a British MP from Northern Ireland and a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. His notoriously cantankerous father’s son, young Ian seemed to be resenting at least the cost of the Saville Report . . . but I took his resentment with the proverbial grain of salt, as I had a flashback to about 15 years ago when I gave him and another Northern Irish politician (whose name eludes me now—but he was of Nationalist stock and had actually run, unsuccessfully, against Paisley, Sr. in a parliamentary election) a ride to Logan airport in Boston after an Irish Studies conference in western Massachusetts. Surprisingly, it was an altogether cordial hour-and-a-half, and one detail that I recall distinctly is Paisley, Jr.’s admission that sometimes he is burdened with toeing publicly the party line (literally) even if he does not really buy it wholesale himself. I suspect that burden was at least partly behind the stance he was taking on the morning news. Mostly the Saville Report has been warmly embraced on first read and is seen widely as long overdue not only in its timing but also in its conclusions.